THERE are numbers we hear again and again in “Golda’s Balcony,” a one-woman play about former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir.

One number is 2,000: the number of years the Jews have been in exile. The other is 6 million: the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

Both numbers go a long way toward explaining why Israel came into being in 1948 and why its people fought — and continue to fight — so hard for a desert homeland.

The tangle of Middle Eastern history and its ongoing tension and turmoil become very personal in “Golda’s Balcony.”

Obviously playwright William Gibson (“The Miracle Worker”) has a distinct point of view here, and it belongs to Meir, who served as prime minister from 1969 to 1974.

In 90 minutes, Gibson takes us into the heart of Meir’s passion for Israel, a corner of the world she hoped would be a paradise and “a model for the redemption of the human race.”

As so often happens in life, ideals and dreams are slammed hard against reality and blood.

The conceit of Gibson’s play, which opened Tuesday at San Francisco’s Geary Theater, is that we’re with Meir in a 90-minute stream of consciousness that flows in and out of her life history.

Gibson’s plot surrounds the 1973 Yom Kippur War when Meir and her Cabinet, while suffering great losses against Egypt and Syria and waiting anxiously for assistance from the Nixon administration, make the decision to arm their planes with nuclear weapons.

It’s an important moment in Meir’s life as a leader, as a Zionist and as a human being: Just how far will she go to protect her greatest dream?

Gibson and director Scott Schwartz, who have seen their play go from off-Broadway hit to the longest-running one-woman show in Broadway history, have overloaded their story with too many bells and whistles.

The irony is that all of it is unnecessary. Standing amid all the whiz-bang effects is Tovah Feldshuh, an actress of such considerable power that she is the show’s greatest special effect.

Decked out in full Golda Meir drag — gray, wiry hair pulled into a bun, prosthetic nose, padded body suit, constant stream of cigarettes — Feldshuh is unrecognizable. Even her voice, which perfectly conveys Meir’s Russian roots and her formative years in Milwaukee, is a marvel.

In addition to playing Meir, Feldshuh plays more than 30 other characters, including Henry Kissinger, Moshe Dyan and Pope Paul VI, all of whom have incredibly distinct voices.

Commanding the stage and capturing her audience almost instantly, Feldshuh easily overcomes the more melodramatic moments in Gibson’s script.

She even holds her own against all the intrusive elements of the busy production that sometimes makes it look like Golda’s a character in a video game.

What comes through, thanks primarily to Feldshuh’s efforts, is the ferocity of Meir’s passion and the enormity of her spirit. Here is a woman of depth, intelligence and fire who tells us right off that the notion of her as this grandmotherly leader making chicken soup for her soldiers is not accurate. Sure she made soup, but at the bottom of the pot, she says, was blood.

The human cost of achieving a dream is never discounted in Meir’s storytelling.

We hear of soldiers’ lives lost, but we also of Meir’s personal losses like that of her husband Morris, who was a casualty of his wife’s ambition.

Feldshuh gives the kind of performance that people will be talking about for a long time to come.

She’s so profoundly committed, so intensely focused and so full of warmth and humor that it’s impossible to resist her charms.

That’s the reason to see “Golda’s Balcony,” but the play itself does expose some intriguing ideas as Meir wrestles with the inexplicable link between good and evil and how “more life for all means death for some.”

There’s a ringing question at the heart of the play that Meir says troubled her always: How many worlds are we entitled to destroy? It’s a question whose echoes reverberate long after the ovations for Feldshuh have faded.